-la! The injunction has an imperiousness which enforces it. It is
repeated by all the bugles of all the subordinate commanders; the sharp
metallic notes assert themselves above the hum of the advance, and
penetrate the sound of the cannon. To halt is to withdraw. The colors
move slowly back, the lines face about and sullenly follow, bearing
their wounded; the skirmishers return, gathering up the dead.

Ah, those many, many needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful body
is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside--could it
not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion?
Would one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the
divine, eternal plan?

A HORSEMAN IN THE SKY

One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861, a soldier lay in
a clump of laurel by the side of a road in Western Virginia. He lay at
full length, upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his
head upon the left forearm. His extended right hand loosely grasped his
rifle. But for the somewhat methodical disposition of his limbs and a
slight rhythmic movement of the cartridge-box at the back of his belt,
he might have been thought to be dead. He was asleep at his post of
duty. But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, that being the
just and legal penalty of his crime.

The clump of laurel in which the criminal lay was in the angle of a road
which, after, ascending, southward, a steep acclivity to that point,
turned sharply to the west, running along the summit for perhaps one
hundred yards. There it turned southward again and went zigzagging
downward through the forest. At the salient of that second angle was a
large flat rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from
which the road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped
from its outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet
to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another
spur of the same cliff. Had he been awake, he would have commanded a
view, not only of the short arm of the road and the jutting rock, but
of the entire profile of the cliff below it. It might well have made him
giddy to look.

The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley
to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which
flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley's rim. This open ground
looked hardly larger than an ordin